Yet
only a day earlier, UPI
reported a story that Norm, famously unassuming, would undoubtedly have been
happy to see get more attention than his widely
reported death–the fact that Ug99, a variant of the stem rust that is the
principal blight of wheat, mankind’s major food-source (and the core of Borlaug’s
lifework), continues its insidious
march into South Asia. It now threatens the food supplies of at least 26
countries. For Borlaug, it was always all about the food–and food’s dark
shadows, hunger and famine, which had haunted and driven him since his youth
amid the dust-bowls of The Great Depression.

As
George Santayana famously remarked in The Life of Reason,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Borlaug lived
long enough to both remember the Depression–and warn against its repetition.
At a conference of world experts gathered to highlight the dangers of Ug99,
Borlaug–then in his nineties–was the only person present to have personally experienced
what a stem rust epidemic meant. For while there is an impressive nomenclature to
capture the elements–basidiospores, dikaryotic urediniospores, stomata - the
truth is grimly physical: despairing farmers in fields of rotting plants, a
long way from happy breakfast
cereal images. With Borlaug’s death, we have lost a link to a past that
truly has the capacity to become a nightmarish future. And the reasons for
that, while complex, lie in the bitterly contested politics of technological
innovation.

For
before he’d even been buried, the usual suspects were out and about, spouting an
environmentalist critique of Borlaug’s extraordinary achievement: more or less
feeding the world for the last half century. For example, Graham Harvey, who
advises on the farming strand on the world’s longest-running radio soap, The Archers, felt fit to
write in The Times of the “worrying
consequences” and “widespread environmental damage” of Borlaug’s Green
Revolution, which is widely reckoned to have fed billions of people, as well as
saving many millions of hectares of wilderness from agricultural use. There are,
of course, issues (when are there not?) and Norm never shied from them. But as
he repeatedly noted, such hand-wringing does very little for the millions of
children “who cry themselves to sleep with hunger each night.”

In
a delightfully dry
denunciation of those vaguely in favor of a global “organic” solution, on
Penn and Teller’s Bullshit!
series, Norm noted that “Producing food for 6.2 billion people … is not
simple.” He added, “[Organic approaches] can only feed four billion–I
don’t see two billion volunteers to disappear.” Indeed, a useful distinction
could be made between the green–those concerned with a more or less
hypothetical future, but nonetheless adept at whipping up public and media
concern (and seeming oceans of public funding courtesy of a cadre of mountebank
politicians) and those working at the sharp end, like Norm, who we might call
brown. In other words, those working in a world involving the suffering of mainly
brown-skinned people who, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, live in far-away
countries, and of whom we know little.

Norm
exuded an old-school charm in person, but had little truck for those with no
experience of the “back-breaking” hardship of actually growing food. Even in
his tenth decade, his passion was for the poor. He politely, but witheringly,
disdained the indulgences of the comfortable cadre of environmentalists in the
West who knew not of what they speak. (He also had sharp and pithy words about the
synthetic pesticide DDT, not least in terms of the near-genocidal
impact of banning it on countless millions of African malaria sufferers). He
was a big hitter in a debate all too often mired in emotionalism.

Ronnie
Coffman of the Borlaug Global Rust
Initiative (BGRI) notes that “we have a lot of complaints about the green
revolution, but those who complain have little awareness of the alternatives …
because stem rust is a global disease, it’s not a national disease. We have to
hang together on this thing or we will all hang separately, because you cannot
defend yourself alone.” Three weeks ago Coffman met a frail Borlaug, and this
humble American hero gave a last, stark warning: “Don’t relax. Rust never
sleeps.”

We
honour him best by helping create the political will, and sustainable funds, to
prevent the kind of global famine that was the stuff of his nightmares. Norm
deserves a quiet night.

John Pollock reviewed “The Man Who Fed the World:
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger”in the January/February 2008 issue of Technology
Review. He is a consultant and author based in London.